Italian audiences in the first half of the 19th century enjoyed a similar glut. Opera composers were on the hunt for plots to fuel their audience’s love of high drama, and were drawn to the Tudor era like moths to a flame. Gaetano Donizetti's Tudor trilogy Anna Bolena (1830), Maria Stuarda (1835) and Roberto Devereux (1837) are probably the most famous today – but in fact Donizetti first forayed Tudor-wards in Elisabetta al castello di Kenilworth (1829). Adapted in a roundabout way from Walter Scott's Kenilworth, the opera dramatizes Elizabeth's infatuation with the younger Leicester – as we'll see, a favourite theme for Donizetti and his compatriots.

Anna Bolena takes its inspiration from Henry VIII’s cold-blooded disposal of his second wife Anne Boleyn; the opera portrays her sympathetically, a victim of Henry’s changeable moods. Donizetti's two last Tudor operas returned to the reign of her daughter, Elizabeth, and as with Il castello di Kenilworth, he depicts her as a tyrannical, moody and indecisive queen, in love either with Leicester or Devereux.

Donizetti’s Tudor trio might be the most famous Italian operas to draw on the tempestuous family, but they certainly weren't the only ones. Gioachino Rossini’s Elisabetta, regina d’Inghliterra (1815) returned yet again to the relationship between Elizabeth and Leicester; Michele Carafa's Elisabetta in Derbyshire (1818) has Elizabeth bustling in Fotheringhay; Saverio Mercadante’s Maria Stuarda, regina di Scozia (1821) follows the brave young Mary's battles with rebellious Scottish leaders; there were yet further Maria Stuardas from Pasquale Sogner (1815) and Carlo Coccia (1827); and Giovanni Pacini's Maria, regina d'Inghliterra (1843) and Carlos Gomes's Maria Tudor (1879) looks to an earlier period, at 'Bloody Mary' and her love for another young man.

Love, revenge, executions, power struggles, family feuds – is it any wonder we remain fascinated by the Tudors? But why did this period of English history appeal to a group of 19th-century Italian composers?

Queens themselves were a rarity at the time in continental Europe, and seeing so many together on the stage had a sensational attraction in itself. The Catholic-Protestant tensions of the Tudor period was another tool Italian composers could use to intrigue their largely Catholic audiences.

Italy was also a divided country at this time. Napoleon had redrawn the map and much of the country was ruled over by foreign powers – who weren't averse to seriously censoring these conflict-ridden operas, with Donizetti's Maria Stuarda a famous victim. In his Tudor operas, Donizetti depicts a turbulent world ruled by absolute monarchs, swayed only by their whims while their subjects lived in fear of causing offence. Maybe Donizetti and co.’s fascination with the famously turbulent times of the Tudors is not so surprising after all.

Maria Stuarda runs until 18 July 2014. Tickets are still available.Maria Stuarda is a co-production with Polish National Opera, Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Paris, and Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona, and is given with generous philanthropic support from Lord and Lady Laidlaw, Susan and John Singer and Michael Hartnall.

There is a much-repeated backstage line: a bad dress rehearsal means a good first night. True, it is usually spoken more in hope than expectation. But can the reverse be true? What if it was a really good dress rehearsal? Donizetti found out the hard way in Naples in 1834, where he was about to have the premiere of his opera Maria Stuarda. It wasn't the first time – and nor would it be the last – that Donizetti fell foul of the Neapolitan censors.

Maria Stuarda's dress rehearsal went exceptionally well, what Donizetti called ‘a fanatical success’. The whole show had been commissioned, written, checked by the official censor who approved it with a few changes, and everything was made ready for the premiere. But just a day or so after, the bombshell dropped: the King refused permission for the opera to be performed.

The reason for the ban was never explained – but we can speculate. It may well have been because the opera includes a scene in which Mary receives confession and absolution. Presenting religious rites and even religious figures is a running theme in the censoring of opera in Italy in the 19th century. But equally it could have been because the first performance was intended to be a Royal Gala and the King had previously forbidden serious subjects for Royal Galas. Whatever the cause the result was the same: all that effort and money and time, but no premiere.

A year earlier, the premiere of Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia in Milan had been a triumph, but such success did not mean it would automatically be fine for Naples. One of the censors there was so horrified by it that he protested about it to the police, stating that ‘it ends with the death of six individuals, five of whom are poisoned at one table, where they have been enticed by the blackest perfidy disguised as polite and chivalrous hospitality’. So, not just a dangerous example of treachery among the ruling classes, but an appalling breach of manners.

Donizetti had written Pia de’ Tolomei for Venice, where it was performed in 1837; for Naples in 1838 it had to be revised to accommodate the censors’ demands. The same year, Donizetti must have felt Maria's history was repeating itself in the Naples rehearsals for his new opera Poliuto. This was based on Corneille’s play on the life of the Christian martyr St Polyeuctus and had already been approved by the official censor. But the King of Naples is reported to have said ‘Let’s leave the saints in the calendar and not put them on the stage’. And that was that.

It's no wonder that Donizetti’s next move was away from Italy to the less restrictive, more glamorous international sphere of Paris, where he arrived more than ready to turn Poliuto into a French grand opera, Les Martyrs.

By 1843, Donizetti’s success was international and his operas acclaimed. But he still had to worry about the censors for his Caterina Cornaro, written that year for Naples – even over such details as whether the censors would allow one character to wear a Maltese cross.

Of course, Naples was not the only Italian city with irritatingly intrusive censors. In a Catholic country, suicide is a mortal sin, and so was an action that could not be presented on stage anywhere in the country. As a result, Donizetti found himself required to ensure that Maria Padilla, the title role of his 1841 opera for Milan, should die at the end of the opera not through suicide but ‘of joy’.

Just as with Giuseppe Verdi, the censorship Donizetti faced in Italy was a crucial factor in shaping the works he created. The concerns of those Italian censors are not ours, yet the effects of their preoccupations remain in so many works as we know them today.

The production is a co-production with Polish National Opera, Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Paris, and Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona, and is given with generous philanthropic support from Lord and Lady Laidlaw, Susan and John Singer and Michael Hartnall.

Donizetti's political drama, which is based on Friedrich von Schiller's 1800 play Maria Stuart, depicts a fictitious meeting between Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots. Donizetti adds a romantic dimension by having Leicester fall in love with Maria. The score contains some of the composer's most moving music and provides a vocal showcase for the two lead singers. Famous pairings for the regal cousins include Joan Sutherland and Huguette Tourangeau, both of whom starred in the first production of Maria Stuarda at Covent Garden in 1977. Find out more in our Opera Essentials series.

It is a co-production with Polish National Opera, Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Paris, and Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona. It is staged with generous philanthropic support from Lord and Lady Laidlaw, Susan and John Singer and Michael Hartnall.

The French directors Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier were at first reluctant to add Gaetano Donizetti’s rarely-performed Maria Stuarda to the impressive list of productions they have tackled during long operatic careers. ‘The librettist [Giuseppe Bardari] was 17 year’s old when he wrote it,’ explains Moshe about their initial hesitation. ‘We all admire Donizetti, but we also know that he could write [many] operas on the same day, and actually use the same music for very different operas.’

However, after listening to the glorious music and reading its intriguing, historical libretto, the directing duo realised that Maria Stuarda was a piece very much worth discovering and reinterpreting. ‘We have done, some years ago, Lucia di Lammermoor,’ recalls Patrice about Donizetti’s masterpiece. ‘So it’s really nice to come back to that composer […]. What we work on is the human truth,’ he continues. ‘And there is really something true in every character [of Maria Stuarda].’

For Moshe, the opera is, above all, about political execution: ‘When you hear the first chords of the overture, which are violent, which are very aggressive, it’s about a woman who is going to lose her head.’ But the director points out that their staging does not just focus on the political power of the story, but also explores how the two real-life characters, Mary, Queen of Scots, and Elizabeth I of England, may have felt as women in 16th-century England: ‘Theatre allows us to put a magnifying glass on the different emotions and the links between the characters… We are more interested in the woman that is Elizabeth and the woman that is Maria Stuarda than the queens as historical figures.’

The two Frenchmen stress that, despite their contemporary interpretation, their production aims to remain true to Donizetti’s lyrical music. ‘The bel canto style [of the composer] is trying to sublimate through the music what the words are really saying. So, in that sense, it’s very strong theatre.’ He laments how Donizetti’s operas can sometimes fall out of fashion because of a preference for later Italian composers like Verdi and Puccini. But for Moshe, the beauty of Maria Stuarda is clearly written in the score, and it’s up to directors, singers and other artists alike to simply follow what it says. ‘If we do that,’ he concludes, ‘we can eventually achieve some human truth in that piece’.

Beaumarchais’s three satirical ‘Figaro’ plays guaranteed him lasting fame – particularly the first two, immortalized in opera by Rossini and Mozart. The irrepressible energy of Le Barbier de Séville (the first and most lighthearted of Beaumarchais’s comedies) proved irresistible to Rossini, who in Il barbiere created a comic masterpiece. In Le nozze di Figaro, Mozart focussed primarily on the most human aspects of Beaumarchais’ second ‘Figaro’ drama (while keeping plenty of the original’s humour), to create one of the warmest and most life affirming works in Western art.

In his great political drama Maria Stuart, Schiller criticizes monarchical absolutism and highlights the dangers of power, embodied in the character of Elisabeth I, who sends her cousin Maria Stuart to death without a fair trial. Donizetti and his librettist Giuseppe Bardari kept much of the play’s essential message in Maria Stuarda; but they also removed the complicated political subplots, and created a love triangle between the Duke of Leicester and the two queens. Schiller’s explorations of the dangers of absolute power, the benefits of democracy and the heroism of freedom-fighting also provided inspiration for Rossini (in Guillaume Tell) and Verdi (in Don Carlo).

Hugo’s great drama depicting the amorous exploits of King Francis I of France was banned after just one performance in 1832, due to its unflattering depiction of a French monarch. When Verdi came across the play in 1850 he described the subject as ‘grand, immense’ and the character of the crippled jester Triboulet (who became Rigoletto) as ‘one of the greatest creations in theatre’. He and his librettist had to fight energetically with the Italian censors to get permission to use Hugo’s play – necessary amends included changing the King into a lower-ranking Duke and moving the action from France to Italy. However, much of the play’s plot and dramatic tone remained intact. Rigoletto was a sell-out success and is still one of the most popular of all operas.

Maurice Maeterlinck’s fantastical Symbolist plays are rarely performed today, but his Pelléas et Mélisande was hugely popular in the 1890s. Maeterlinck’s aesthetic – the exploration of characters’ inner feelings through elements of the natural world, often in a fairytale-like setting – was regarded as a welcome contrast to the naturalism prominent in Parisian theatre of the time. Debussy described the effect of seeing the play in 1893 as ‘like dynamite’ for him. He treated Maeterlinck’s text with great respect when he wrote his opera, leaving much of it intact and only omitting a few short scenes. He also ensured that every nuance could be clearly conveyed, with a predominantly syllabic word setting, almost like ‘sung speech’.

Shakespeare’s much-loved comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream inspired one of Benjamin Britten’s most popular operas, composed in less than nine months. Britten and his partner Peter Pears (who took the comic role of Flute/Thisby in the opera’s premiere) wrote the libretto, skillfully compressing and reorganizing Shakespeare’s text while sticking faithfully to the Bard’s words – Britten noted that they added only one line of their own. Britten heightened the supernatural strangeness of the fairy scenes by making Oberon a countertenor (a voice rarely used in opera at the time) and Puck a spoken role, and added to the comedy of the rustics’ Pyramus and Thisby play by deftly parodying grand and bel canto opera.

Maria Stuarda runs 5–18 July 2014. Tickets are still available. The production is a co-production with Polish National Opera, Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Paris, and Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona, and is given with generous philanthropic support from Lord and Lady Laidlaw, Susan and John Singer and Michael Hartnall.

Rigoletto runs 12 September–6 October 2014. General booking opens on 15 July 2014.

The production of #ROHMaria wasn't wonderful, but the minimalist decor allows us to concentrate on the psychological drama. — Jane Ennis (@leonora1) July 6, 2014

What did you think of Maria Stuarda? Maria Stuarda runs until 18 July 2014. Tickets are still available. A co-production with Polish National Opera, Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Paris, and Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona. Generous philanthropic support from Lord and Lady Laidlaw, Susan and John Singer and Michael Hartnall.

'I feel like an actress who sings,' Carmen told presenter Suzy Klein when asked how she views opera's twin demands of singing and acting. 'It was different in the past when singers just stood and sang their music beautifully, but nowadays we're more in the action. Opera was created [to unite music and theatre]: Monteverdi said opera was 'Recitar cantando', which means acting while singing - first acting, then singing.'

It's an approach which she shares with the production's directors, Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser, whom she's relishing working with:

'It's bombastic! They're very demanding but I've learned so much from them. You have to think about so many things when you perform. [When working on the dramatic aspects] Moshe suggested I be inspired by the music and he was totally right. If you give the right accent on the word and the music, half of the work is already done.'

Her commitment to throwing herself into a role doesn't stop with changing her hairstyle to match that of her character (prior to taking up the role of Elizabeth I, she cut her hair short and dyed it a fiery red to match that of the iconic Tudor monarch). She also has to contend with an extremely weighty costume:

'I asked for the costume from the first day because you must carry on [and get used to it]. It's more than two stone in weight. It's not easy to sit, move, or to run in, wearing very high heels. I also have a bald cap and a wig on, plus a crown. It's a lot!'

Despite Maria Stuarda only being Carmen's second run of performances at Covent Garden, she says she feels at home in London: 'It's my second home and one of my favourite theatres in the world. I've sung just once at the ROH before - in La bohème - and when I came back, from the porter to the General Manager they welcomed me back saying "Carmen! It's a pleasure to have you here!". It's like a family. Our job is very difficult but when [you're treated] like this, it's the best that an artist can receive.'

'The soil of England, vile bastard, is defiled by the touch of your foot!' That's a line to get you noticed, especially when hurled between royalty, in this case by Mary Queen of Scots at her Tudor cousin Elizabeth I. In Donizetti's Italy it was also a line to get you banned, and Maria Malibran's refusal to sacrifice it at the opera's eventual 1835 premiere at La Scala led to Maria Stuarda being dropped from the repertory, barely to resurface for 120 years.

You can see why Malibran wouldn't compromise. The Confrontation Scene that brings Act I thundering to a close is the only time in the opera the two rival queens share the stage – though 'share' might not be the right word. Donizetti expertly turns the bel canto idiom – as we understand it now, that of placing vocal beauty above all else – to his dramatic purpose, constructing a scene of breathtaking intensity.

The meeting (entirely fictional) has been engineered against the queens' wishes by Leicester, the tenor love interest (his romantic feelings also fictional). It's a classic love triangle: Elisabetta loves Leicester, Leicester loves Maria and Maria loves him. Maria's kindly gaoler Talbot has let her roam the forest around Fotheringhay, where she is incarcerated. Meanwhile, Leicester has steered Elisabetta's hunting party the 100 miles from Windsor to Northamptonshire (made possible through a somewhat fanciful approach to English geography) for this 'chance' meeting.

In the opening recitative section, Elisabetta's nobility, pride and quick jealousy that we saw at the opera's opening is obvious again. Buoyant phrases in the flute give a pastoral sense, but it's undercut by the urgent pulsing in the strings. Elisabetta is caught between Leicester's ardent tenor, urging her meeting with Maria, and her dour baritone adviser Cecil, insidiously pushing Elisabetta towards removing through violence this threat to the English throne. Maria and Talbot arrive and a roll on the timpani pulls us into majestic dotted rhythms from the whole orchestra, leading us chromatically down to an anticipatory dominant 7th chord. From this Maria murmurs a fragile 'O Dio!'. There follows a killer of a dramatic pause.

But rather than an action-packed dialogue, Donizetti has Elisabetta haughtily turn aside and lead the canonic 'È sempre la stessa' ('She's still the same'), where to imitative music all the characters individually reflect on the situation. In short, nothing happens. The delayed action not only builds tension for the onslaught but hints that neither queen is really interested in the reconciliation Leicester so craves.

But now Leicester encourages Maria to start a humble prayer for forgiveness, 'Morta al mondo' ('Dead to the world'), a simple song that recalls her peaceful earlier aria 'O nube! che lieve' ('O clouds that lightly drift'). Elisabetta usurps Maria's lovely melody and takes it for her own, corrupting it with references to Maria's 'betrayed bed' and 'unavenged husband', her 'crimes and betrayal'. Leicester's attempt to comfort Maria only stokes Elisabetta's anger.

Finally Maria snaps. Unaccompanied except for the occasional shocked interjection from the orchestra, she launches a tirade against the queen. Undeterred by Talbot's breathless 'O Dio!', she delivers a series of determined insults, relishing each one, her voice rising higher and ever more exultingly to the final smack in the face.

Then all hell breaks loose, the strings hurrying beneath Elisabetta as she summons her guards, rushing us into the final stretta (the fast closing section for a finale). Here, for the first time in the scene, Donizetti colours the vocal lines with the rapid, decorative notes of coloratura, in a brilliant expression of Elisabetta's uncontrollable anger, Leicester's anguish and Maria's triumphant satisfaction. We hurtle to the close, where a series of decisive chords from the brass bring the curtain down on what is undoubtedly one of Donizetti's finest and fiercest finales.

Maria Stuarda runs 5–18 July 2014. Tickets are still available.The production will be broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 on 14 July from 7.15pm.Maria Stuarda is a co-production with Polish National Opera, Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Paris, and Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona, and is given with generous philanthropic support from Lord and Lady Laidlaw, Susan and John Singer and Michael Hartnall.

Gaetano Donizetti’s opera – as with Friedrich von Schiller’s source play – was not a historical record, but a constructed drama. Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier’s production mixes the iconic historical figures of the two queens with contemporary characters in order to stress that the violence linked to power and desire remains constant in any period. Elisabetta and Maria are enclosed within the shell of their political function, but they are also real characters in a world that could be familiar to us. Now, as then, the horror of capital punishment remains the same.

A Scandalous Premiere

Donizetti wrote Maria Stuarda in 1834 for the Naples Teatro San Carlo, intending it as a vehicle for the soprano Giuseppina Ronzi de Begnis. But due to its subject, the opera was banned in Naples before it even made it to the stage – the opera was only performed because the great Maria Malibran insisted on performing it, and sang the title role in the work's premiere at La Scala, Milan, on 30 December 1835. The local authorities there also moved to ban the opera, and it gradually disappeared from the repertory, until a revival of interest in 1958. It has become increasingly popular ever since.

A Tribute to Schiller

The libretto of Maria Stuarda is based on Schiller’s 1800 play Maria Stuart, which depicted the final days of Mary, Queen of Scots, and her fateful meeting with Elizabeth I (an event that was entirely invented by Schiller; the two queens never met in reality). The intensity of the subject appealed to the composer, who added a romantic dimension by having Leicester fall in love with Maria. As Donizetti’s librettist for the opera, Giuseppe Bardari, was very young and inexperienced, Donizetti may well have had a hand in the libretto himself.

Powerful Intricacy and Vocal Showcases

The score for Maria Stuarda contains some of Donizetti’s most moving music, particularly Mary’s confession duet with Talbot and her aria in the finale as she calmly goes to her death. The opera also provides a magnificent showcase for the two singers playing Maria and Elisabetta in their extended duet at the end of Act I. Famous pairings for the roles of Maria and Elisabetta have included Joan Sutherland and Huguette Tourangeau, Janet Baker and Rosalind Plowright, and Edita Gruberová and Agnes Baltsa.

Three husbands, two murders and the Queen who refused to meet her: key landmarks in the 44-year life of the tall, long-fingered, auburn-haired, French-educated, multi-lingual, sweet-spoken, staunchly Catholic and disarmingly attractive Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots.

The husbands: each so unsatisfactory that no woman would wish them on her worst enemy. First, for just over two years, the sickly Dauphin (briefly King Francis II), a year her junior. They had grown up together at the court of Henry II of France, Mary’s home after being shipped as a five-year-old to escape in-fighting in Scotland. Learning French courtly graces and state politics, she paid homage to her ancestry by occasionally donning Scots chic: not tartan, a later invention, but the hides of slaughtered deer. Less advisedly, she also declared her entitlement to the English throne. In 1560, Francis II died aged 17 without, in the opinion of some observers, reaching puberty; one insider wrote darkly of ‘undescended testicles’. So Mary returned to Scotland the same year.

Five years later, Mary’s second marriage confirmed English fears of her becoming a problematic Catholic force. Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, was Yorkshire-born, Scots Catholic and an alcoholic. Feigning religious zeal, he schemed against Mary while indulging in sexual adventures reported chiefly as unreportable.

Third and last, literally a husband to end husbands, came the brutal James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, a Protestant, whose alleged disposal of Darnley in 1567 is said to have inspired the nastier bits of Macbeth.

And so to murder. In March 1566 assassins stormed Mary’s Holyrood apartments and stabbed her Italian secretary, David Riccio, 56 times by her own account. Mary suspected it was a plot by Darnley to cause the miscarriage of their own child, the future James I of England. For his part, Darnley thought his wife too intimate with Riccio, and suspected the imminent child was not his own.

Darnley’s own time was up 11 months later. One night, gunpowder stored under his bedroom exploded. It did not harm him; he was discovered in an adjoining field, intact but strangled. Bothwell was proclaimed as the culprit. No witness dared appear at the trial, so Bothwell was acquitted. Three months on, after being abducted and probably raped by him, Mary married her self-proclaimed protector. She cried for days, humiliated by the dour Protestant marriage rites and her bestial husband.

Bothwell’s enemies moved against him. He fled to Norway and died mad in a Danish prison. Mary was interned at Lochleven, where she miscarried twins. Forced to choose between abdication and trial for murder, she renounced the throne. One year on in May 1568, she escaped and made a doomed attempt to regain power before committing a fatal error. Instead of returning to the safety of France, she crossed into England, hoping for royal protection.

From her arrival in England to her execution in 1587, Mary remained under house arrest, mostly in the dilapidated castle at Tutbury, Staffordshire. Elizabeth’s council advised the Queen that Mary, a magnet for rebellious Catholics, was ‘too dangerous to let loose’. Numerous plots followed, all devised to format: assassinate Elizabeth, invite Spanish troops, incite an English Catholic rising, enthrone Mary.

Finally, letters exchanged between Mary and Anthony Babington, a Catholic conspirator, led to her trial at Fotheringhay Castle, Northamptonshire, in October 1586. No proper legal basis existed for an English court to try a foreign monarch and she defended herself with formidable skill. Even after the guilty verdict, Elizabeth waited three months to sign the death warrant – maybe out of respect for law and monarchy, maybe from fear of continental reaction.

At her eventual execution, Mary's famous serenity on the scaffold – homaged in the final scene of Donizetti's opera – was grievously tested. Two blows of the axe were needed to reach the ‘one little gristle’ that yet connected head to body. With the third blow went an illusion: her fine hair was revealed to be now a wig. Her lips kept moving for 15 minutes.

Mary’s lasting appeal transcends national or religious causes. Rather, she takes her place with Hamlet or Werther as a tragic-romantic icon: a vibrant, sophisticated soul both hungry for experience and weary of it; a wanderer who becomes a prisoner; a victim of states, of ideologies and of life itself.

This is an extract from David Roberts's article 'My Name Now Martyr Is', which you can find in full in the programme book for Maria Stuarda. This is available in the theatre at performance times and from the ROH Shop.

Maria Stuarda runs 5–18 July 2014. Tickets are still available.The production is a co-production with Polish National Opera, Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Paris, and Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona, and is given with generous philanthropic support from Lord and Lady Laidlaw, Susan and John Singer and Michael Hartnall.